Challenge: The Food

Moving on down the list of the challenges in my poll...and this one's a doozy. 

• What is the thing that we use to celebrate every holiday, rite of passage, or celebration?  Food.
• What do we bring to people who've lost a loved one or gained a new baby in the family? Food.
• What is the factor that makes up 80% of whether we lose weight or not?  Food.
• What do we look forward to as comfort at the end of a hard day?  Food.
• If we feel we deserve a treat for one reason or another, what do we turn to most? Food.
• What is the centerpiece of our family traditions?  Food.

Hands down my biggest challenge, and the one that most of my friends say affects them the most, is making the right choices with food.   You can hit the gym every day and work yourself out till you're exhausted and dripping with sweat, but if you don't eat right, you won't lose weight. It takes a 3500 calorie deficit to lose just one pound, and unless you live in the gym, you have to modify your eating in order to play the numbers game right.

What's even more challenging is the fact that you can't get away from temptations.   They're everywhere from the commercials on TV for the $9.99 pizza deal, to the leftover Halloween candy that floods your office, to the family birthday dinner, to the sandwich artists at Subway who tell you for just a dollar more, you can upgrade to a five dollar footlong and look at you like you're crazy when you say "no thank you."

In fact, I can't think of any other addiction that you can't go cold turkey on because you must have food to live.  Imagine someone who is addicted to cocaine and gets clean, only they have to do a small amount of it three to five times a day in order to live.   Would they ever get clean?  But that is the challenge facing those of us who have food addiction.   We physically must have food to live so we can't put it down like an ex-smoker can put down the cigarettes and walk away forever.  The challenge that faces us is to learn how to modify our addiction and make it manageable to eat three to five times a day and not fall off the wagon.

I'm still working on it and probably will be the rest of my life.  It's been a year and I'm still finding out things about food I thought was "safe" but that turn into calorie traps. Just this morning I heard on the radio that a banana has just as many calories and sugar as a Snickers bar.  I haven't verified that but it stands to reason.  Now nutritionally, it's obvious what is the better choice.  But still, I don't think I'll be eating any more bananas anytime soon. 

I don't have any magic cures or surefire tricks to conquering the challenge that is food. It's been over a year and I am still learning to look at it as a source of energy, not reward or comfort.  There are still pitfalls that threaten to trip me up along the road of the journey every day.  The trick, as is the advice when kicking anything else, is to take things day by day and to forgive yourself and get back on track if you have a slip-up. And also know that this is a hard struggle, and it is commendable just to have decided to attempt it.